World Net Daily: Transgender people are like anorexic people or jihadists, and also bullies

The managing editor for World Net Daily on Sunday compared transgender people to anorexic people and jihadists, and argued that the gay rights movement was a form of tyranny.

In a 3,272-word column, excerpted from the original Whistleblower magazine article, David Kupelian claimed gender dysphoria was a mental illness similar to eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder or phobias (he listed 32 as examples) that were rooted in some early traumatic experience.

“Ironically, one the most extreme of all of these conditions — at least in terms of its preferred treatment, which often involves the amputation of healthy body parts and whose sufferers attempt suicide at an alarming rate — is for some reason in the process of being de-pathologized, that is, reclassified as normal,” Kupelian writes.

He says the “powerful LGBT lobby” had successfully pressured the American Psychiatric Association to change the name from gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria, which Kupelian complained indicated the condition was “no longer considered abnormal or ‘disordered.’”

Kupelian said this was just a step toward gay and transgender rights activists’ goal of having the condition “legally declared to be an absolutely normal variant of human sexuality.”

“Reality check: Transgenderism (or transsexualism) is not normal,” Kupelian argued. “In fact, it’s so abnormal and unnatural that a staggeringly tragic 41 percent of all transgender individuals living in the United States have attempted to commit suicide.”

The same report Kupelian cited also notes that transgender people suffer from stress related to the disapproval and confusion of friends, family and others, in addition to the threat of anti-transgender violence.

A clinical psychologist quoted in that report says that “transgender people show a significant decrease in substance abuse problems and depression … and their mental health significantly improves” after transitioning.

Kupelian blames gender dysphoria on unhealthy family relationships and early emotional or physical trauma, and compares transgender people’s upbringing to children in the Muslim world who “develop the ‘mental illness’ of wannabe jihad martyrdom.”

“Little jihadists are created when, from an early age, they are continually indoctrinated, intimidated, degraded, rewarded, tempted, lied to, punished, threatened and praised (for reinforcement) – until their little developing minds and emotions are not their own anymore,” Kupelian says. “They have a new implanted identity, very different from the one they were born with.”

He argues that the gay rights movement, which he placed in scare quotes, had “metastasized into a burgeoning form of totalitarianism” because it was working to overturn discriminatory laws or draft new laws that expanded civil rights for gay or transgender people.

“This revolutionary sexual anarchy movement, which more than any other ideology, including Marxism, Islam or atheism, has the potential of permanently corrupting our nation’s core ‘operating system’ called the family – is the one issue that almost everybody is afraid to confront,” Kupelian writes.